Updating Standalone ESXi the Easy Way

Managing ESXi without vCenter is annoying enough, but updating it is the worst. I feel like I have to relearn it every time I do it. I’ve found an easier way to do this, however, provided you meet some conditions:

• Your ESXi host has internet access
• You can SSH to your ESXi host

Thank you, Paul Braren of TinkerTry.com for this article, that I will invariably use again, on updating ESXi from the web with a one-liner:

esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.7.0-20200604001-standard -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

If you want to upgrade to a different image profile, just replace “ESXi-6.7.0-20200604001-standard” with the image profile you are after. Image profiles can be found here.

One you run this, it will take 5-10 minutes to complete. You will see something like this:

Afterwards, you will need to reboot the host. You can easily do so by typing reboot in your SSH session.

Give it 5-10 minutes to reboot and get on with your day!